Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add skills/acartine/foolery/knotsnpx skills add acartine/foolery --skill knotsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/acartine/fooleryWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/acartine/foolery/knots)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/acartine/foolery/knots"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/acartine/foolery/knots.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00054 | $0.00599 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00027 | $0.00300 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00120 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00060 |
Grade A, and why
knots scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Knots
Agent identity
Create or receive a lease before writing workflow metadata:
kno lease create --nickname "<session-name>"
Bind that lease to every claim, creation, advance, note, and handoff-capsule command you run for the session. Agent identity for notes, handoff capsules, state transitions, and gate decisions comes from the bound lease.
Do not copy legacy --*-agentname/model/version identity flags from telemetry
or command history. They are deprecated, ignored by current kno, and can
leave metadata attributed as [unknown <date>] when no lease is bound.
Create a knot
Run:
kno new "<title>" -d "<description>" --lease <lease-id>
Use a short action-oriented title. Write the description with the expected outcome, relevant context, and constraints for the next agent. Add handoff context for the next actor with:
kno update <id> -H "<capsule>" --lease <lease-id>
Execute a knot
Follow this sequence:
kno claim <id> --lease <lease-id>
- If you are working inside a git worktree, run Knots commands as
kno -C <path_to_repo> ...because Knots is installed for the repo root, not the worktree path. - Record the current state from the claim output.
- Use the claim output to determine the current state's completion goals.
- Do the work and validate it.
- If the goals were met, advance with a guarded state check:
kno next <id> --expected-state <current_state> --lease <lease-id>
- If you are blocked, validation fails, or the state's goals were not met, roll back safely:
kno rollback <id> --lease <lease-id>
If the claimed knot lists children, handle the children first:
- Claim each child knot and follow that child prompt to completion.
- When the child knots are handled, evaluate the outcomes.
- If every child advanced, advance the parent.
- If any child rolled back, roll the parent back too.
Do not invent alternate transition workflows. Prefer claim, next, and
rollback over manual state mutation unless the user explicitly asks for it.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 6d ago First seen · 82 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 9791294bf39f
knots is a skill published in the GitHub repository acartine/foolery (54 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 599 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
write-documentation
Use when writing or substantially rewriting human-facing prose: documentation, README, guides, blog posts, emails, Slack messages, PR descriptions, release notes, or any text a human will read. Not for code comments, commit messages, or agent-to-agent communication.
document-release
Use when implementation on a branch is complete and it is about to be merged or PR'd — or when finishing-a-development-branch reaches its docs-audit gate — and after code changes are committed, to ensure all project documentation accurately reflects shipped code. Covers README, ARCHITECTURE, CONTRIBUTING, CHANGELOG…
stress-test
Use when a design, plan, or decision needs adversarial scrutiny before proceeding. Interrogates every branch of the decision tree, providing recommended answers and forcing explicit agreement or pushback. Triggers on "grill me", "stress test this", "poke holes", "challenge this design", or when…
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
writing-plans
Use when you have a spec or requirements for a multi-step task, before touching code.
getting-up-to-speed
Orients on an unfamiliar or stale codebase at the start of a session, after compaction, or whenever the project state is unclear. Loads beads context, deep-dives the codebase, and produces a structured 'current state' summary. Triggers on phrases like "catch me up", "where are we", "orient me", "what's the state of…